Nightingale

Um... you're his girlfriend's mom and you don't like him (yes, he can tell). Of course you're intimidating and he doesn't want to hang out there.

nah, we head to Vegas tomorrow afternoon, then LA on Thursday evening

Zion is wonderful! If you have a chance, stop by Bryce Canyon, which is not too far away and worth seeing as well. The Grand Canyon is so beautiful. It's amazing how cloze Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon are, yet they're so different, and Death Valley National Park is not that far away, and in some areas of that park, it's almost as if you're on another planet... you go from mountain peaks and wildflowers to sand dunes and salt formations and areas that look like rivers made from salt crystal.

Happy Birthday, Lady! Hope you have a wonderful day!

Awesome!!!! Congrats!

Take the class off base then, through MSF. They offer it in a million places, and they have bikes for everyone.

If you're looking to learn, take the motorcycle safety course. It'll give you some vital skills, plus probably give you a break in your insurance rates. Then, you can ask your instructors in the course for recommendations on bikes.

You can cover anything nowadays with make-up. I helped a 12 year old girl learn how to use make-up to cover a port wine birthmark that covers a third of her face. She wants to look "normal" and I can't say I blame her (although I do think she looks beautiful without make-up and told her so). If make-up can cover up stuff like that, it can cover up a tattoo.

+1

My dad's got the screws from his bunion surgery, as well as an inch long sliver of glass that the ER doctor pulled out of his hand.

11/11, but my mom's a science teacher and a former med tech, so I grew up listening to her about this stuff.

Stay with your brother until you get on your feet, but don't mooch. Help around the house, help with the kids if there are any, do your best to be useful and a good guest. Family is there to help in your time of need, and you'd do the same for them if you could, just be as good a guest as you can, and repay them by staying motivated to get on your feet as soon as you can and don't forget their kindness.

Most of the folk stuff from the 60s and 70s is pretty accessible if you know D, G and A, and sometimes a C and an F will get thrown in there or an A7. you don't even need the F bar chord, you can use the cheater F. When I go camping, I've got a binder that has songs from Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, John Denver, Simon and Garfunkel, and a lot of the stuff from around then, and I threw in some of the easier stuff from later on, and most people know at least 80% of the stuff in the book, so it makes for good sing-alongs. I've got a Little Martin travel guitar that goes almost everywhere with me. This website is a good place to start your own binder. http://www.azchords.com/ The chords aren't always right, but they're a good start, and you can usually find them in easy keys. Just make sure you've got a good capo so you can get the song in the right key for you to sing.

I don't want to get this kicked to speaker's corner, but note that I also mentioned training. It's a LOT harder to get proficient at unarmed self defense than it is at armed self defense, particularly for women, who are virtually always going to be smaller and weaker than a man, and we can't count on attackers to be unarmed. That's why we have weapons. I've been doing unarmed self defense for 20 years and armed self defense for about 5. I'm very proficient at hand to hand, and I've used it to save my life before. If I had to do it again, gimme a gun, because even after over ten years of training, that situation was too damn close. As for the "bigger than him boyfriend", well, a boyfriend can't be with you every second of the day, and a stalker, well, stalks. Eventually, he's going to get you alone and vulnerable, and that's when he's going to make his move. So, unless you're prepared to be with a woman every moment, that really isn't a good option, is it?

Print out every one of the emails, with complete headers. Take copies to the police and file a report. They won't do anything, but you're creating a paper trail. Next, go to your county sheriff and do the same thing. Get copies of the reports. Law enforcement does not generally take stalking, particularly cyber stalking seriously, so you have to be very pro-active. I've had a stalker for going on five years now. I've had police flat out tell me "come back when he hurts you." even though he's emailed things like "I don't want to hurt you but you're pushing my buttons...maybe I'll come down to your apartment (insert address here) and wait." He's stood outside the train station so I've had to drive to work. He's waited outside the music school so I've missed my guitar lessons because I don't want to risk a confrontation. He follows me around town. Cyber stalking escalates. You need to be pro-active about your safety, especially if you're pretty sure that it's someone you know in real life. Do NOT respond to the emails. Respond once, with one line. "Do not contact me again." save this email too. Don't block his emails, and don't change your email address, even though the cops will tell you to do this. Doing this will frustrate your stalker and drive him to take more extreme measures to contact you, like showing up at your front door or leaving headless woodland creatures on your vehicle (been there!). Just live your life, document everything as you go, and try to find some kind of humor in the patheticness of someone who has resorted to stalking over the internet. Also, get yourself into some good self-defense classes, don't go anywhere alone, and if you're inclined and your state and county are cooperative, use those emails and police reports as a way to get a CCW/CHL permit to carry a gun to protect yourself, and take some classes and get some good training if you don't have it already. Stalking is a sign of mental instability, and you don't want to be unprepared if you've got a nutcase after you. Edit: I just read that you're not currently in the US, so check to see what kind of self defense options may be available to you in wherever you happen to be living.

Haven't a clue. Don't think it should be illegal.

Too many people DO have a problem with that. That's my point. There are too many people out there that want to tell me that I can't protect myself when I am a living example that the world is not the safe, happy, fluffy-bunny and sunshine place that they want to think it is, and if we just pass enough laws then everyone will all get along. I spent ten years of my life working with vicitms who listened to that shit and didn't take any steps to protect themselves until after they became victims, and then it was too late! Once they learned the hard way, then they came to me to train and learn how not to be a victim next time, and it helped them be stronger and heal and learn not to jump at every shadow, but it didn't stop what had already happened. Getting trained and taking steps to protect yourself before something happens is vital, and I'm damn lucky I did, even if it was just by coincidence (I just did karate because I liked it!). You say there's a "slight chance" of finding yourself in a bad spot? Look at it from a different perspective: 1 out of every 5 American women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and 4 out of every 100 men. (source: Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women, 1998). I don't call 20% a slight chance, but hey, I guess 4% isn't so bad. Overall, I guess men are more likely to walk away from bad spots. When a guy fights with you in a bar, it's not about killing you or raping you, it's usually about a display of drunken dominance, and even when it isn't, when you put a guy in a fight with another guy, you've probably got close to even odds. If you are trained, your odds are better. If you put a woman in a fight with a man, her odds are going to be less, even if they're the same size, and the reason they're fighting is probably not just a bar fight. Women simply don't have the strength or muscle mass that men do, so carrying a weapon is a reasonable precaution.

Wow.... I'm glad you're so confident in your training. I've trained in karate for about twenty years now, and I'm certainly not that cocky. Have you ever had your skills tested in a real life situation? I have. I've trained and practived my emergency procedures without a gun, and when I had to use those procedures, it was still a damn close thing, and my attacker was unarmed, as far as I know. If he'd had a gun and I was unarmed, nothing close about it. If we'd both had guns, well, I train with my firearms more often than many police officers, and a hell of a lot more than the average thug, so I'd put the odds slightly in my favor there, plus the element of surprise.

That is not a bad thing.

OMG ROFL!

You should have the choice to live your life without owning guns. I respect that. What I absolutely cannot respect is the position that takes the choice out of the hands of the individual, the "people" and places it in the hands of the government. The right to keep and bear arms is one that explicitly belongs to the people, the individual citizens. That right is to own guns, or to choose not to, and it's an individual decision. It's not a decision that anybody gets to make for me, and it's not a decision that I get to make for you.

I'd probably have a hard time being looked after too, as I'm a very independent person, but I know that as long as I was sound in mind and able to communicate and not in pain, that my family would rather have me with them, and any change requires an adjustment (to whoever mentioned Terry Schiavo above: when the brain is gone, that's a different story.). It also helps that I make my living more with my mind than my body. There have been successful lawyers and teachers who are paralysed, so I know I would still be able to contribute in some way, particularly in this age of information and technology. After her accident left her a quadriplegic, Jill Kinmont became a teacher, got married, and by all accounts, went on to live a very happy, successful life. A professor at the university where I went to law school was paralyzed by a chiropractor. He's still teaching, still finding a reason to wake up every morning and get on with living. Steven Hawking is still busy doing theoretical physics things that I don't understand. Life doesn't suddenly become not worth anything because bad shit happened to you. You can either deal with it and make the best out of what you've got left, or you can give up and die. So far, I haven't seen physical disability as a good reason to stop living.

My family's Catholic and believe that all life is sacred, so they wouldn't see it as a burden, and I wouldn't see taking care of one of them as a burden either. Then again, I also have a really big family, and we all chip in so no one person is left with anything that's too much. My grandparents currently need round the clock care, and we're each over there about once a week, and we're all chipping in a little bit to cover the nursing care. When everyone contributes, it doesn't seem like too much to do or too much to pay for.

Even quadriplegics can contribute to society. Personally, as long as my mind was intact and I could communicate and wasn't in pain, I'd consider life worth living. The story of Jill Kinmont is pretty amazing.

I didn't vote for Obama, but I wish him the best and I hope he doesn't fuck up as badly as Bush did. For the record, I didn't vote for Bush either. And yes, I did vote.